Spalding, Esperanza

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      Lorde’s Sunburst, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Ava Max, Clairo, PmBata and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Lorde, ‘Solar Power’About the last thing to be expected from a songwriter as moody and intense as Lorde was a carefree ditty about fun in the summer sun. “Solar Power,” the title song from an impending album, is just that, riding three chords and brisk acoustic rhythm guitar (and glancing back at George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90”) to celebrate hitting the beach, getting sun-tanned cheeks and tossing away her “cellular device”: “Can you reach me? No! You can’t,” she sings, and giggles. She has an offhand but attention-getting boast — “I’m kind of like a prettier Jesus” — and an invitation completely free of ambivalence: “Come on and let the bliss begin.” JON PARELESAva Max, ‘EveryTime I Cry’Just to be certain, I have Googled and confirmed that no one has yet referred to Ava Max as Una Lipa. There’s still time. (This is a compliment.) JON CARAMANICASaint Jhn and SZA, ‘Just for Me’A beat ticks along behind slow-pulsing synthesizer chords as Saint Jhn appears, claiming lovelorn angst but safely distancing it with Auto-Tune. But when SZA arrives, a minute and a half in, her voice leaps out. Like him, she proclaims a desperate, dangerous infatuation. Unlike him, she sounds like she means it. PARELESPmBata, ‘Favorite Song’Endlessly cheerful lite-pop-soul, “Favorite Song” is a bopping strut from PmBata, toggling between singing and rapping, though less hip-hop-influenced than his earlier singles like “Down for Real.” The come-ons are a little frisky, but the attitude is never less than sweet. CARAMANICAJomoro featuring Sharon Van Etten, ‘Nest’Jomoro is the alliance of two percussionists turned songwriters: Joey Waronker, Beck’s longtime drummer, and Mauro Refosco, a David Byrne mainstay. Of course they need singers, and they have assorted guests on Jomoro’s album, “Blue Marble Sky.” Sharon Van Etten provides sustain and suspense on “Nest,” singing about “the darkest corner, the back of the mind” over a steadfast march of synthesizer tones textured with bells, shakers and hand drums: physical percussion to orchestrate a mental journey inward. PARELESClairo, ‘Blouse’It was inevitable that current bedroom-pop songwriters would discover the hushed intricacies of predecessors like Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. Clairo embraces both, recalling Smith’s whispery vocal harmonies immediately and Drake’s elegant string arrangements soon afterward. She’s singing about a kitchen-table lovers’ quarrel and a situation neither man would think to portray: “Why do I tell you how I feel/When you’re just looking down my blouse?” PARELESEsperanza Spalding featuring Corey King, ‘Formwela 4’Over an eddying sequence of arpeggios plucked by Corey King on acoustic guitar, surrounded by the sounds of springtime, Esperanza Spalding sings in patient and gentle tones about long-term trauma, and about reaching out for support. “Wanna be grown and let it go/really didn’t let it go though,” she begins. When Spalding gets to the chorus, it mostly consists of one repeated line: “Dare to say it.” This track, released Friday, comes as part of Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, an evolving project that imagines musical collaboration as a pathway toward healing. (It already yielded a suite of three powerful tracks, created with other prominent musicians and released earlier this year.) She and King wrote “Formwela 4” in response to a simple challenge: “Say what is most difficult to say between loved ones.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOHypnotic Brass Ensemble featuring Perfume Genius: ‘A Fullness of Light in Your Soul’The Minimalism-loving Hypnotic Brass Ensemble has rediscovered “Sapphie,” an EP that was released in 1998 by the prolific English musician Richard Youngs and rereleased in 2006 by the Jagjaguwar label, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary with left-field, interdisciplinary collaborations. Youngs’s original version was a stark acoustic meditation, just quiet fingerpicking behind Youngs’s high, breaking voice, with musings like “Sometimes it’s better never than late/and there’s a spareness of days” and “Happiness leaves everything as it is/and the future isn’t anything.” Hypnotic Brass Ensemble adds inner harmonies and orchestrates them with Philip Glass-like motifs for brass and woodwinds and surreal reverberations as Perfume Genius sings in a rapt falsetto, trading Youngs’s solitude for immersive depths. The video — perhaps taking a hint from the song’s first line, “working around museums,” shows the visual artist Lonnie Holley creating images with spray paint, twigs and wire. PARELESJulian Lage, ‘Squint’The gangly, big-boned drum style on this track might be recognizable — particularly to fans of the Bad Plus — as the sound of Dave King when he’s having fun. The drummer is heard here in a newish trio, led by the virtuoso guitarist Julian Lage, and featuring Jorge Roeder on bass. “Squint,” the title track from Lage’s Blue Note debut, begins with the guitarist alone, causally demonstrating why he’s one of the most dazzling improvisers around; then King comes in and things cohere into that lumbering swing feel, held together by Roeder’s steady gait on the bass. RUSSONELLOPoo Bear, ‘The Day You Left’Poo Bear (Jason Boyd), a songwriter and producer with Justin Bieber, Usher, Jill Scott and many others, shows his own achingly mournful voice in “The Day You Left.” He’s a desperately long-suffering lover who knows he’s been betrayed for years, but still wants his partner back. The production, by a team that includes Skrillex, keeps opening new electronic spaces around him, with celestial keyboards in some, shadowy whispers in others. PARELESNoCap, ‘Time Speed’More glorious yelps from the Alabama sing-rapper NoCap, who, over light blues-country guitar, is enduring some push and pull with a partner. “I might be gone for a while, just write,” he urges, but confesses he’s not in the driver’s seat. If she feels compelled to stray, he says, “just don’t hold him tight.” CARAMANICA More

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      Esperanza Spalding’s Quest to Find Healing in Music

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      The bassist, vocalist and producer’s latest project is a therapeutic suite of songs sparked at an artists’ retreat she started during the pandemic.Esperanza Spalding has never been one to sit idle. Her wandering spirit has brought this 36-year-old musician major achievements over the past decade and pushed her work in new directions. In 2017, Spalding, a bassist, vocalist and producer, spent 77 straight hours in the studio, writing and arranging songs. The resulting album, “Exposure,” was pressed directly to CD and vinyl for a limited release of just 7,777 copies. Her next project, “12 Little Spells,” explored the healing power of music; each song correlated with a different body part.Continuing in that vein, Spalding’s new release, a suite of three songs called “Triangle” due Saturday, is meant to bolster listeners, physically and emotionally. But this time, she’s setting her sights on pandemic tension.“I was remembering ways that music had supported me,” she said on a recent call from her native Portland, Ore., “and wondering if we could go deeper into those themes.”Spalding, an easygoing conversationalist who effortlessly accesses a broad range of scientific vernacular, lights up when unpacking the medicinal powers of music. But with her youthful curiosity and considered cadence, it doesn’t feel like you’re talking to a stuffy professor. Over the past year, she spent time building a retreat in Portland where like-minded artists can think and create without real-world interruptions. Occasionally, she jammed with other musicians, including the R&B luminary Raphael Saadiq and the jazz guitarist Jeff Parker.The concerns about health and restoration in “Triangle” have been percolating in Spalding for quite some time. After the release of “12 Little Spells” in 2018, she took a semester off from teaching music at Harvard and moved to Los Angeles to finish writing an opera with the jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who had fallen ill.“I was worried that Wayne’s health was not going to hold and we wouldn’t be able to finish his opera while he could see it,” Spalding said.But over six months, he “completely sprang back to life,” she said. “He was like this wilted plant that finally got the water and just completely transformed before our eyes.”When the pandemic took hold just a month later, she returned to Portland to start the retreat, where she and 10 other artists of color spent a month on a 5,000-acre property. It’s an idea Spalding had been considering for years.“People use this weird uninvited breath of the pandemic to start the things that they’ve been putting off,” she said. “That definitely happened for me.”The real spark for “Triangle” came at the end of the retreat, where after an event, she sat alone in a garden and wondered how she could assuage the stress of isolation. “We’ve all experienced being confined in a situation that we didn’t design and didn’t ask for,” she said. “A feeling like we can’t break out of it.”She started drafting sketches for songs, with sounds rooted in Sufism and South Indian Carnatic and Black American music, and sent them to would-be collaborators.Three months after the retreat ended, Spalding drove to Los Angeles to finish the music with Justin Tyson, Phoelix and Raphael Saadiq.Will Matsuda for The New York TimesThe compositions — which were written in consultation with music therapists and neuroscientists — are supposed to elicit different emotions. The hypnotic “formwela 1,” carried by Spalding’s looping falsetto, is meant to aid self-soothing during stressful times. “So you learn the song and then you can play it for yourself in your head when you are stuck in a home and there’s no way the dynamic in that moment is going to change,” Spalding said. The ethereal “formwela 2” and soulful “formwela 3” are designed to calm interpersonal aggression and re-center the listener once the anger has dissipated.Three months after the retreat ended, Spalding drove to Los Angeles to finish the music with the drummer Justin Tyson, a regular collaborator of hers; the keyboardist Phoelix, a go-to producer for the Chicago rappers Noname, Smino and Saba; and Saadiq, who’s worked with D’Angelo, Solange and Alicia Keys.“Honestly, she didn’t need anything,” said Saadiq, who produced “Triangle” with Spalding and Phoelix. “She’s so moving in how she plays and how she thinks. I likened myself to Phil Jackson — like, why was he there when Michael Jordan was on the court?”“Triangle” was recorded in his studio. When he heard the final version, he recalled the sound being so transformative that it helped him mentally reset. The music, Saadiq said, “took everything out of my head. I was 100 percent clear.”When played in one go, “Triangle” burrows into your head and stays there, its meditative blend of chants, the sound of rain and vocal repetition meant to pacify prevailing anxiety. “It’s happening,” said Shorter, who plays on the third track. “It’s out there, but it’s interesting what she’s doing. She’s taking all kinds of chances and not giving up. If you see a fork in the road, which path should you take? Take both of them. She’s done that and is going to need good company.”“Triangle” is being released through Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, where she, other musicians and practitioners in music therapy and medicine will explore how songwriters blend therapeutic sounds into their work. This summer, she will host in-person pop-up labs throughout New York City, where residents can make appointments and have compositions created to fit their mood.“Basically, what we want to do is hear what people are wishing for from the music, like, what do you need?” she said. “It’s an invitation to hear what you need a song for, and then that informs what we look for in our research, in our investigation.”The songs created in the lab will be available on the website. Some of them will be featured when Spalding releases a full album this fall.It seems like she’s not interested — at least not currently — in the conventional rigors of recording albums, putting them out and going on tour. These days, Spalding would rather improvise and see what happens. Still, she understands that her new initiatives might take some getting used to.“It’s a lot,” she said. “I know part of the work I have to do is introducing and making legible the shape of this project and the offering, because it’s not an album and it’s not a concert. It’s not this and it’s not that.”“I want the collaborative truth of it to be legible,” she added. “That’s part of what’s most important to me about sharing music.” More